Hardware

Hello,
I was wondering if anyone can give me recommendations on hardware that is budget friendly and compact and is capable of running m0n0wall.

I looked at this http://www.soekris.com/net4801.htm
but it would be way to expensive for my situation roughly $250 for the box and power supply shipped and then I would have to purchase a CF card as well.

Thank you for your time.

I have been very happy running Monowall on a Nortel Contivity 100... they can often be found cheap on ebay.  Hardest part was finding a memory upgrade (comes with 40mb??) to 72mb.

I run an up-link to my gigabit router backbone, and my internet connection is only 12mbit, so 10/100 connections on the Nortel Contivity is more than fast enough.

You can run Monowall also run on a old pc... ok, it needs more power, but if you can life with it... I bought here an old pc for 50 CHF to run a server on (my monowall is from pcengines.ch which is to expensive in your case).

Hi, I'm from Italy.

My m0n0wall works brilliant on ALIX board.

Three LAN + 1 Wifi.
I bought it http://landashop.com/catalog/pcengines-alix-2d13-lx800-mpci-battery-p-955.html

Guys are Spanish. They are trustable.

The old Via super small systems and the old Geode thin clients can often be had cheap.  You just need to add another nic, and you have a firewall.  Some will even support dual and 4 port nics.

http://computers.shop.ebay.com/i.html?_nkw=EPIA+MINI+ITX&_sacat=179&_odkw=via+c3&_osacat=179&_trksid=p3286.c0.m270.l1313

http://computers.shop.ebay.com/i.html?_nkw=geode&_sacat=179&_odkw=EPIA+MINI+ITX&_osacat=179&_trksid=p3286.c0.m270.l1313

I run mine here on the type of hardware that is typically thrown away - tired old Pentium PCs with 128MB of RAM with m0n0wall installed to a 16MB IDE Flash drive. For NICs I got a box of 20 Intel Pro 10/100 PCI cards for $15 plus shipping on ebay. This is the kind of PC hardware that can not possibly run a recent version of Windows, so we find it all the time either thrown away or recycled. Unless you need really high network thruput or heavy VPN usage, this trash works just fine.

Recently, I picked up a GTA GB-1000 firewall appliance running GNATBox v 3.4 firewall software on ebay for $20 plus $13 shipping. Ten years ago, these sold for thousands of dollars. But now they are end of life and no longer supported by the maker, but still usable. Having used GNATBox firewalls in the past, I knew they are FreeBSD based like m0n0wall is, so I figured it could probably be made to work. Although I stumbled a bit at first, I was able to get m0n0 installed and running on it with some help from one of our m0n0wall experts here on the forum (thanks again brushedmoss!) It has a Intel Celeron 634.78-MHz 686-class CPU, 128MB RAM, four Intel 10/100 NICs, runs headless from CF or IDE Flash, and comes in a 1U rack mountable case. The fans are a bit loud though, at least compared to my current found in the trash m0n0wall PC, a 166MHz Pentium.

If you really want to do this on the cheap, it's certainly easily doable. You just need to know where to look for suitable stuff. Try a local electronic recycler, or second hand store.

Good luck.

[very reasonably priced]

I ran into this website while researching other things. They offer very reasonably priced prebuilt ALIX systems running pfsense.

All you would need to do with one of these to run m0n0wall would be to take it apart to be able to access the CF card, and replace it with one that has m0n0wall on it. At most you would be out another $30 or so to buy a small CF card and reader/writer. Or I suppose it may be possible to upload a m0n0wall image directly to it if pfsense will allow that - perhaps only renaming the m0n0wall image to what pfsense expects would work?

http://nw-ds.com/

http://nw-ds.com/shop/firewalls.html

Basically, these are 3 NIC ALIX - $140, or $175 with wirelesss.

Good source for CF cards and reader/writer cards:

http://www.logicsupply.com/

I have no connection to either of these vendors other than buying CF stuff myself from Logic Supply.

I use a neoware Ca2 thin client via 800Mhz 512 MB ram, 2xUSB, most have 2x10/100, some have 1x10/100 + a PCI slot.

Make sure the one you are getting has more than one nic, or a free PCI slot + riser as you cannot find the darn riser anywhere.

slap an intel dual gig nic in it, and your off for less than 100USD